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Locked Up In La Mesa (2011)

by Eldon Asp(Favorite Author)

3.27 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0983723702 (ISBN13: 9780983723707)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Dirt City Press

review 1: In the 70's, Steve Peterson got arrested for smuggling marijuana across the Mexican border. He ended up in a notoriously bad Mexican prison for almost a year due to the large amount of pot he was smuggling. La Mesa reminded me of the South American prison in the tv show Prison Break. Inmates were sort of thrown in there and left to their own devices. Some inmates had their entire families living in there with them. A hierarchy was structured with the "leader" of the prison living in an onsite house with a jacuzzi. The inmates could buy property from him (Peterson bought a small cell with cardboard walls for a few hundred dollars) and he controlled all the buying/selling/trading that went on within the prison.The prison system itself was really interesting, but I felt like ... morethe author was focused more on telling a bunch of random crazy stories rather than giving us a good background on the prison or even himself. You know how you go to a party and there's that one guy who dominates the conversation with his crazy stories? It's interesting at first, but after a few stories your eyes sort of glaze over and your mind starts wandering - that's sort of what this book was like. Every chapter was a different story and nothing was really cohesive besides the fact that they all took place in this prison. It was just a collection of outlandish stories. I have no doubt that they really happened, but I would have preferred a little more background and cohesiveness overall.Another sort of nit-picky thing was the overuse of certain words or phrases. Almost every page had a sentence that ended with "...or whatever." and it got really old after about the first chapter. The whole book was a very conversational style, but maybe a little TOO informal (like I said above, it was really like listening to a guy tell you stories at a party, complete with common oral sentence fillers). But it was a quick and easy read if you're at all interested in the Mexican prison system of the 1970s, just don't expect a thought-provoking novel.
review 2: A Non-Fiction Horror Story This is a book written to document Steve Peterson's life during the several years he was locked up in La Mesa, reputed to be the worst prison in Mexico. Mr. Peterson with the aid of Eldon Asp has written a set of stories that portray how terrible being in this prison is. The two of them in collaboration make it clear that the entire Mexican Prison system as well as the officials including judges are totally corrupt. Mr. Peterson would have us believe that his incarceration was due to his playing the hero and making sure that the two people involved with him did not have to serve the same sentence that he had to serve.His claims that you could buy anything in prison if you had enough money may or may not be true. In order to finish reading his tale of horrors, I had to suspend disbelief, which was a bit easy as I've worked in the prison system in our country and know that people other than prisoners are also often criminals who haven't yet been caught.I would hope, that after reading this book, there would be people in law enforcement in Mexico who could do something to change the system there, starting with the lowest cop on the beat to the highest Mexican officials. Perhaps that is a pie-in-the-sky hope, but I hope this book is an aid in some kind of prison reform in Mexico and possibly even some kind of reform in the prison systems in our country.This book was an interesting read, though anything but joyful. It was unfortunate from my standpoint that Mr. Peterson felt the need to couch his tales in gutter language, even though I know it's the language of the prisons on both sides of the border. I'm sure there are untold stories that Mr. Peterson can possibly use in another book, particularly if he discovers that the horrors in this book helped in any kind of prison reform.Dawn Edwards, Kindle Book Review less

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